What space smells like, how killer whales sleep and eight other weird & wonderful facts you didn’t know you needed
THINK the sun is yellow? Well you’d be wrong.
Author Edward Brooke-Hitching has spent a lifetime searching for weird and wonderful facts about science, history, nature and famous people for his new book and the results are mind-blowing.
The Most Interesting Book In The World is full of quirky nuggets of information and trivia that you didn’t know you needed.
Here, Natasha Harding brings you some of the best . . .
1) HAPPINESS can give you a heart attack. A 2016 study by University Hospital Zurich on takotsubo syndrome, otherwise known as “broken heart syndrome”, found it can also be set off by happy events, such as your football team winning.
The condition refers to when the heart muscle changes shape and suddenly weakens, causing pain, breathlessness and, occasionally, death.
2) FINGERPRINTS – sometimes called “chanced impressions” – start forming in the second trimester of pregnancy and are influenced by the baby touching the walls of the womb.
This is why they are truly unique to every person, even identical twins.
3) IT is impossible for astronauts to whistle while they work.
The air pressure in a space suit is only three Newtons per square centimetre (N/cm²), whereas normal atmospheric pressure is 10N/cm².
This means there are not enough air molecules around to make the sound.
4) THE average person has 13 secrets, according to psychologists. The research, by Michael Slepian and Katharine Greenaway, which examined 10,055 secrets across ten different studies, also found people preoccupied with secrets can feel physically weighed down by them and tend to judge hills as steeper and distances longer than they actually are.
5) OF the more than one million artworks in the Louvre in Paris, only the Mona Lisa has ever been given its own postbox to cope with the amount of love letters sent by admirers.
6) WHAT does space smell like? American astronaut Don Pettit described a pleasant odour of “sweet-smelling welding fumes”. Others have compared it to “burning metal” or “walnuts and brake pads” and “burnt almond cookie”.
The first humans to walk on the moon, Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong, said that it was similar to gunpowder.
7) A POD of killer whales sleep by forming a tight circle and synchronising their breathing and movements.
They take breaths together then submerge before resurfacing a while later.
Experts say this synchronicity is unlike anything else seen in the animal kingdom.
8) YOU shed about 35kg of skin in your lifetime, according to a 2011 study published in Environmental Science & Technology.
The researchers also found that the squalene oil on shedded skin reacts with harmful ozone in homes and offices, which can improve the surrounding air quality.
9) IN the Second World War, dogs would parachute alongside British paratroopers to be used as guards, track enemy soldiers and detect mines behind German lines.
But not all the dogs were willing to leap from the aircraft and bribes of raw meat sometimes had to be deployed.
10) DONALD TRUMP had his X/Twitter account hacked in 2014 by a Dutchman, who guessed his password was “yourefired” – the mogul’s catchphrase from reality show The Apprentice.
The same hacker took over the former US President’s account again a few years later by guessing his new password to be “maga2020!”.
– Edited extract taken from The Most Interesting Book In The World: A Miscellany Of Things Too Strange To Be True Yet Somehow Are, by Edward Brooke-Hitching (Simon & Schuster, £14.99), out on Oct 10.